


Sympathy for the Devil

by kvisan



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Multi, Serial Killers, Sibling Incest, Unhealthy Relationships, lucille thinks of thomas as her property, what if she thought of edith the same way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-03
Updated: 2015-11-03
Packaged: 2018-04-29 17:14:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5135993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kvisan/pseuds/kvisan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sympathy for the Devil, or Five Times Lucille Sharpe Spilled Blood and the One Time She Didn't.</p>
<p>Mature rating for vague discussion of murder, and vague-er mentions of sex. The explicit sex will happen in another fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sympathy for the Devil

**prima**

Lucille had not hesitated before her first murder, nor had she felt regret after it. All she had felt was the relief, almost euphoric, as she watched her mother twitch and gasp her last in the bloodied bathwater, the cleaver jutting from her fractured skull. It felt free, and right, and that feeling would light many of her dark days in the asylum.

She learned the right words to say, the right gestures and expressions that the doctors wanted to see, platitudes expressing her sorrow, love for her mother, and the fog of madness. But in truth, she had relished the power she’d held with the cleaver in hand, and every second of her memory was crystal clear. 

Lucille discarded and eventually sold nearly all her mother’s jewelry and clothing, because the only true inheritance her mother left her was the ring, the neatly coiled braid of hair, and the rusting cleaver buried in the clay pits.These treasures, Lucille cherished.

 

**secundia**

Pamela disliked Lucille, and didn't care who knew, least of all Lucille herself. Lucille smiled placidly, pretended not to notice or care, filing away every thinly veiled insult to mull over later and plot her eventual retribution. For every cup of poisoned tea she handed the older woman, she imagined herself countering Pamela’s sword thrusts like a skilled fencer, parrying each blow, and finally breaking through her guard to plunge her blade into Pamela’s heart.

Poisoning was slow and arduous and not nearly as thrilling as hacking her mother’s head in twain, but how sweet it was when Pamela could no longer speak without coughing up bile and blood. Then, Lucille began to drop her bland veneer, just to see the fear in Pamela’s dulled eyes as she whispered threats or handled her a little too roughly.

Lucille sat up with Pamela on her last night, timing the pauses between each rattling, labored breath until finally there was no more. And once again, that elation, that power. Vindication. Thomas was hers alone again, at last.

 

**tertia**

Lucille struggled to maintain her cold exterior against Margaret's pointed and unrelenting friendliness. Not that she felt herself liking the woman, oh no. The Scotswoman was like a particularly stupid dog that couldn't understand when it wasn't wanted.  Until the bitch finally had the grace to become bedridden, Lucille lacked for space on her piano bench, on her favorite loveseat, at the dinner table, and anywhere else Margaret managed to find her.

Margaret was the only one who never suspected anything, not even at the end. Lucille slit her throat while she slept, after spending a tortuous three hours sponging Margaret's fevered brow. She had to spend another three hours cleaning bloodstains off the ceiling, but it was worth it, and immediately afterwards she swept triumphantly down to the piano and played the flashiest, most expansive piece she knew, reveling in the elbow room.

Thomas came down from his eyrie to investigate  and Lucille almost persuaded him to fuck her bent over the piano, then and there. But propriety and paranoia won out. Thomas watched from the lift as she heaved Margaret's pallid corpse into the clay vat and tossed the bloody cloths into a fireplace, and only then did he relent and take her into the marriage bed, the ring back on her finger where it belonged.

 

**quadria**

Enola failed her. Enola made promises and broke them. Enola deserved her slow, painful death, gradually suffocating herself through the hole Lucille jabbed in her lungs.

Lucille barely paid attention as Enola died. Instead, she held the small cold body of her daughter close, swaddled in velvet, wondering at the tiny hands that no longer weakly grasped at her finger. The beautiful blue eyes, Thomas's eyes, closed now. Her sweet baby looked more peaceful in death than she ever had in her short life, and Lucille's cold and dormant heart felt as though it would split in two with sorrow.

Thomas came in, but Lucille paid him little mind until he made to go to the dying Enola.

"No," she said, sharply, and Thomas froze.

"But she's--" he protested, and Lucille silenced him with her raised hand, and the ring glinting on her finger.

"She's nothing to you now," said Lucille. "But this, this was to be our daughter." She bent her head over the small bundle, and her chest heaved as though she wept, but no tears came.

Thomas knelt beside her and gathered her into his arms, and Lucille felt betrayed and furious. This should have been the happiest moment of her life, being held by the father of her child, the last distraction gone forever, but instead all she could feel was the terrible coldness and stillness in her arms.

It was almost a week before she finally dragged Enola's corpse into the lift and dumped her in the vat. The tiny body of her baby went in, too, laid carefully in the red clay. And then Lucille set about stitching herself tightly closed at the fault line, as tightly as she laced her corset, as tightly as she smiled at anyone who wasn't Thomas.

  


**quintus**

The old man never even raised his hand to defend himself against her, and he had no lovely long hair to take as a memento. So his life sputtered out like the flame of an oil lamp lacking fuel, and Lucille couldn't even watch the light go out of his eyes.

Thoroughly disappointing. And later, she would feel the slight brushes of something like regret. But only slight.

 

**nil**

“Lucy,” said Edith, sweet and bright as could be, thinking nothing of the diminutive, and Lucille hated that she no longer hated it.

Thomas was enamored with her, and even before Lucille became herself caught in the web of Edith's charms, she could see why. She caught herself thinking that Edith was like a ray of sunlight, and felt ridiculous for the cliche, but it was true. Edith made good on her promise, and there was new light and new warmth in the cold halls of the house.

Lucille cut a piece of Edith's hair, a small lock near the end, and Edith helped her arrange it into spirals and affix it inside a locket. And then, she held still as Edith cut a piece of her own hair. When it was done, and the charms about both of their necks were tucked away into their clothing, Lucille let out the breath she'd been holding and drew Edith into her embrace.

Here was someone who could be hers, as Thomas was hers. Edith was too golden to be the daughter they’d lost, but her manner was like enough to Thomas’s earnestness and thoughtful enough to keep up with Lucille’s own occasionally byzantine conversation, and it was only too easy to pretend.

Thomas found them like that, entwined, and he stayed by the doorway for a while watching before he came into their arms.

“We’ll always be together, won’t we,” said Lucille, and her blue eyes met Thomas’s over Edith’s mussed hair.

“Never apart,” said Thomas, and Edith a heartbeat behind him. And all the blood she’d spilled, that rush of godlike power over life and death, all of it was nothing to this. They were _hers_ to keep, forever.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Do I need to put a disclaimer here that I absolutely do not endorse this stuff in real life? My conscience says yes. Lucille is a terrible, horrible person who should be in jail. But Jessica Chastain is a wonderful and charismatic actress and she had SUCH CHEMISTRY with Tom and Mia and so now I have all these weird feelings. Thanks, Jessica. Thanks a lot.
> 
> Also I guess this is an AU where for some reason Edith doesn't see/care about the ghosts in Allerdale Hall. Maybe in a follow-up I'll try to explain that?
> 
> Finally, thank you for reading! Please let me know what you think. :)


End file.
